Cocaine Killing Forests in Colombia

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Thousands of square miles of tropical forest have been chopped
down to grow coca plants, whose leaves supply the world with
cocaine. But the drug's environmental impact doesn't stop there.

Areas that surround coca plantations suffer particularly high
levels of deforestation, too, found the first study to quantify
how coca is reshaping landscapes in Colombia.

But there may be a bright side. In some parts of the country,
national parks seemed to establish a buffer zone that reduced
forest felling.

The relationships between coca plantations and deforestation are
complex, and simply creating parks probably won't stop new coca
fields from popping up. But the findings might offer insights
into ways to intervene that would target both issues.

"I like the positive message of feeling like protected areas are
really working at some level," said Liliana Davalos, a
conservation biologist at SUNY Stony Brook. "But we can't just
say that we're going to put parks all around and suddenly people
are not going to plant coca."

"There are 60,000 families that grow coca in Colombia, and this
is a family enterprise," she added. "If we had an easy fix for
this, we would have fixed it."

Davalos started studying the connection between coca and
deforestation in Colombia more than a decade ago. Along with Peru
and Bolivia, Colombia is one of just three countries that produce
coca leaves for the world's cocaine market. And it out-produces
the other two.

At first, scientists thought that coca might actually help reduce
or stabilize clear-cutting because it is such an efficient crop.
Compared to a root like cassava, which requires a lot of space
and effort to harvest but brings in a relatively small amount of
money, coca is valuable for its dense leaf cover, and it fetches
high prices. That means that coca farmers can pack a lot of value
into a little space.

By the 1990s, though, studies started to suggest that, instead of
slowing deforestation, coca was actually speeding it up.
According to some estimates, up to four hectares of forest were
cut down for every hectare of coca planted. Davalos heard those
numbers, but she could not track down their source.

So for the new study, she and colleagues analyzed satellite
images of Colombia that allowed them to distinguish between coca
plantations and other types of land cover. They also studied
aerial photographs taken during routine censuses of illegal crops
by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. The images
covered a five-year period, from 2002 to 2007.

Over that time, the researchers reported in the journal
Environmental Science & Technology, forest cover
dropped from 56 percent to 46 percent in the Central region of
Colombia, and from 82 percent to 78 percent in the South. The
North lost nearly 5 percent of its forests each year.

Coca accounts for just a small percentage of total deforestation
rates, Davalos said, but the crop threatens trees beyond the
plantations themselves. Areas that are closest to coca
plantations, the study found, suffer disproportionate rates of
deforestation, even after taking into account the location of
roads, cities, rivers, mountains and other factors that affect
how accessible those areas are.

"The closer you are to coca, the more deforestation you have,"
Davalos said. "Our working hypothesis is that there is all this
economic activity when new coca cultivation happens, and this
economic activity leads to more deforestation."

The hopeful news was that deforestation rates were lower within
established national parks than in comparable areas that were not
officially protected. Davalos hopes that surveys and
conversations with coca-growers might help explain why.

"A lot of people and scientists believe that parks really don't
make much of a difference, especially when they are big and
unmanned, like many of these are," she said.

"Our results were so surprising, we had one reviewer write to us
and say those parks have this effect just because they're
remote," she added. "We wrote back and said we took that into
account."

Still, parks are probably not a panacea, said Luis Solórzano, an
ecologist at the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation in San
Francisco. Often, he said, farmers who grow illegal drugs flock
to parks because they seem like safe havens, offering protection
against fumigation and other measures that are meant to destroy
their fields.

Beyond the landscape factors considered in this study, he added,
there are all sorts of socioeconomic and political issues that
influence the growth and spread of coca plantations.

Nevertheless, the new work is a solid step toward finding ways to
understand and combat both deforestation and illegal drug crops.
Knowing how the two are related might help experts develop better
law-enforcement strategies or new incentives for other types of
land use.

"People usually walk away from these kinds of analyses because
they are politically charged, and it's difficult to be
objective," Solórzano said. By turning data into analysis, he
said, the findings now have a chance to inform policy decisions.